Track Internal Campaigns to Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager
If you use Google Analytics (GA) in your website, then you’re probably already tracking your external campaigns properly. But are you tracking your internal campaigns as well? These are marketing campaigns that you run within your website, like homepage banners that link to promoted products.
External campaigns are tracked with GA’s built-in utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term parameters to identify the marketing campaigns that drive users to your website.
However, for internal campaigns, you shouldn’t use these utm_source / utm_medium / etc tracking. If you do, GA replaces your external campaign tracking with these internal ones.
There are four ways to track internal campaigns in GA:
| Method | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Enhanced Ecommerce’s Promotions | Designed for internal campaign reporting, built into GA | Report is limited to Ecommerce’s metrics |
| Events | Quick to setup and understand | Limited to clicks on links, doesn’t encapsulate entire user behaviour |
| Site Search | No coding needed | Function isn’t meant for internal campaigns |
| Custom Dimensions | Designed for business-specific reporting needs, flexible usage | Some coding required |
I personally prefer the Custom Dimensions method because it makes the most sense. It doesn’t force Events nor Site Search to be adapted for campaign tracking. And it can be used in reports that contain other dimensions and metrics.
And it can be done fairly easily with Google Tag Manager (GTM). Let me show you how.
14% increase in revenue for Skydive Beach and Beyond
Skydive the Beach and Beyond have built a thriving business catering to the thrill seeker. Taking their first plunge back in 1998 they’ve grown from a small beachfront outfit based in Wollongong, NSW to an Australia wide skydiving business with 13 drop zones. Serving a digitally savvy clientele for more than 15 years Skydive the Beach and Beyond discovered their website visits weren’t translating into conversions.
Taking a dive
While their business website was certainly bringing in potential daredevils, it wasn’t translating into paying customers. With an eye to increase conversions Skydive the Beach and Beyond brought on analytics and A/B testing experts, Sparkline, to see what was stopping consumers taking the plunge.
An initial investigation of the Skydive website revealed a four step process before reaching the confirmation page. Building a goal funnel in Google Analytics, Sparkline determined potential jumpers were bailing out when they needed to enter their full address details and at the payment page. An additional stumbling block required customers to enter the name, phone and email details of any friends joining them for the jump.
Address pages go head to head
Having pinpointed what was causing customers to bail out before purchase Sparkline, partnering with the Optimizely platform, ran an A/B experiment on the address details page. After liaising with Skydive they discovered the business didn’t require full address details, or the names of jumping partners. All that information could be collected at the jumpzone.
Armed with this information Sparkline and Optimizely tested three variations on the details page. The first shortened the fields to just name, email and mobile. The second asked for the address details but installed an auto-fill option and the third remained unchanged.
Variation one: Shortened form fields
Original
Variation two: auto-fill
Variation 2
Original
And the winner is…
After running for 98 days the page with the address fields removed proved the most successful. Compared to the other variations less fields increased the conversions to the payment page by 13.4%. The experiment showed extra fields were acting as an obstacle with the goal funnel conversion rate improving by 20.36%. Skydive went ahead and launched the slimmed down details page.
Performance Summary
Since implementing the stripped back details page Skydive the Beach and Beyond have enjoyed a nearly 15% increase in the number of successful transactions. In just a month since changing their sign up pages as a result of the A/B experiment their revenue is up 14.29%.
Authors: Zin Ko Hlaing (Data Analyst) and Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar (Managing Partner & Co-Founder)